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Policies For Shorter Law Review Articles Go Unenforced

As a law librarian who works extensively with law journals, I can attest to the general consensus that law review editors believe that law review articles are too long.The ABA Journal recently reported on a UCLA law professor named Stephen Bainbridge who wrote a 39,000-word law review article this fall. "But he wondered if he should cut it. Why? A joint statement from 2005 from 11 leading law reviews indicated that they wanted to start running shorter articles based on responses to a survey that reflected 'one particularly unambiguous view shared by faculty and law review editors alike: The length of articles has become excessive.'"Currently "submission guidelines from Harvard and Yale now explicitly state that they discourage articles of more than 25,000 words." Articles that are 25,000 words equal about 50 pages. Professor Bainbridge decided to look at the seven most recent issues of the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Review and check the length of the articles. He saw that zero of Yale's article were under 50 pages, and that zero of Harvard's were under 60 pages. Professor Bainbridge said that he didn't know if there are other journals out there enforcing the rules more strictly. "At the very least, however, it seems that Harvard and Yale are just joshing us. So [his] advice is: Write the article to the length you need and ignore the word limits."The law review at my school favors articles that are closer to 30 pages in length. The thought is that because we are a more practical school, our audience prefers shorter, practical articles. I think it works, and there are definitely differing audience considerations than the traditional Harvard & Yale journals. It may mean that the advice to ignore word limits may depend on the journal to which you are submitting.

The current version of Standard 601(3)(a) was developed during the Comprehensive Review as a method of involving a law library in the process of strategic planning required of a law school. It was envisioned that the planning and assessment taking place for a law school (under what was then Standard 203) would incorporate the work done by the library under this new Standard. To ensure that incorporation, it was decided that a written assessment should be completed by the library. However, when the requirement for strategic planning for a law school was removed during a later phase of the Comprehensive Review, no change was made to the new Standard 601. As a result, the library community has been left…

Law libraries are in the information business. To act as superior guides to this information, we must also be in the people business. We must be concerned with the people who seek our information. And we must be concerned with the people who guide those seekers to the information (i.e., our staff).

Contrary to popular belief, it's not easy to be a staff person in the rigid hierarchy of an academic law library. Particularly at a time when law libraries are facing increased budget pressures that require staff to do much more with much less. This is especially challenging with longtime staff who have seen their jobs change dramatically since they were hired. Many of these folks were not formally trained in librarianship, and they may be resistant to the flexibility needed in today's law library.

Given these challenges, how do we motivate our staff to be the very best guides to our information?

To that end, there was an enlightening program at the AALL Annual Conference in 2013 t…

As we further consider how to train future lawyers for the Algorithmic Society and develop the quality of thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning that will define smartness in this new age, law schools must reach beyond their storied walls.

In law, we must got beyond talking about algorithmic implications to actually help shape algorithmic performance. We need lawyers and programmers to work together to create a sound "machine learning corpus." There's potential for an entirely new subfield to emerge if given the right support. With many law school attached to major research universities, it's a great place to start this cross-pollination and interdisciplinary work.

This type of interdisciplinary work would help to satisfy the career aspirations of advanced-degree seekers but also the wishes of many college presidents, deans, and faculty members who see an interdisciplinary professional education as a path to greater relevance, higher enrollments,…